Requests to manage hosted services or renew domains will not be honored unless they have been properly verified according to the authentication methods previously established by the membership owner. Generally this means that the individual member logs in to our system to take the appropriate action. However, there is one exception to this policy.
Transfers between member accounts that consist only of funds may be made with only the approval of the sending member. In other words, anyone with a funded NearlyFreeSpeech.NET membership can transfer funds to any other member's account simply by knowing the recipient's account number.
This means that the following conditions (and only these conditions) can be resolved by anyone:
- A site hosted here is unavailable and the only reason it is unavailable is lack of funds.
- A registered domain that meets all of the following criteria.
- The domain is currently registered through us.
- The domain is currently within the auto-renew period (which runs from about 10 days before expiration to about 30 days after expiration).
- The domain was previously set to auto-renew by the member.
- The only reason the domain has not auto-renewed is lack of funds.
Please note that our system does send out-of-funds and domain auto-renewal failure notifications to the member's contact email address, but that our privacy policy strictly prohibits us from discussing or disclosing information about the applicability of these conditions to any particular situation in the absence of a properly-verified request from the member. In other words, we cannot tell you whether or not the unavailability of services obtained through us is a result of lack of funds.
If you believe you are in this situation, you can take the following steps:
- Create a new NearlyFreeSpeech.NET membership.
- Make a payment sufficient to cover the expected costs.
- Use the "Transfer Funds Between Accounts" action on the Accounts tab.
- Enter the recipient member's account number as the Destination Account.
- Select the "To another member's account" transfer type.
- Enter a transfer amount sufficient to cover the expected costs.
- Select the "Transfer Funds" button.
Please keep in mind that although hosted services typically come back online within a few minutes if lack of funds was the problem, domain registrations can take 24-48 hours to start working again if they were expired at the time of renewal.
If you do not know the member's 12-digit account number, you will not be able to use the process above. Instead, you will have to open a free "Transfer" assistance request providing a site or domain name sufficient for us to identify the recipient and specifying the amount of funds you wish to send. This is a manual process that can take significantly longer to complete, so please use the automated process above if it all possible.
The following additional information applies only to individuals who are unable to access their own membership.
Under ordinary circumstances, our Terms & Conditions of Service impose a strict limitation of one membership per individual, for good reasons. Under ordinary circumstances, it is strongly preferable to complete the appropriate recovery process to regain access to your membership. We provide extensive recovery options for a lost username or password, a lost email address, or a lost 2-factor device. But under ordinary circumstances, a member just logs in to our site and does whatever they need to do, and they do not wind up reading this.
If extraordinary (but temporary) circumstances exist — like if a member is temporarily unable to log in to their regular membership because they are traveling and don't have needed info to access or recover it — where violating the letter of the one-membership-per-person policy by creating a second membership for the sole purpose of depositing funds into the first will mitigate a larger harm, we allow it.
However the "temporary" qualification of those extraordinary circumstances is very important and bears close scrutiny. Taking this action is only a good idea if that applies. In other situations, taking this action may not mitigate a larger harm, they may exacerbate it.
Although it is extremely rare and our system takes many precautions to prevent it, it is remotely possible for a member to, through a sufficiently large combination of consecutive instances of bad judgement and/or dishonesty, engineer a situation where they have set security protocols to verify their identity that they subsequently they have no way to meet. In such cases, it is very likely to be preferable to allow services to be deleted, and then pursue re-obtaining them once they are removed from the inaccessible membership. Adding funds through this process may only serve to increase the delay before that happens.